


That Long Evening of Life

by Carmarthen



Category: Romeo And Juliet - All Media Types, Rómeó és Júlia (Színház)
Genre: 16th Century CE, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Birthday, Bittersweet, F/M, Family, Fix-It of Sorts, Future Fic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Old Age, Sequel, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 08:35:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5199287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/pseuds/Carmarthen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nurse Angelica always dreamed of a day when Julia and Tybalt would be happy, surrounded by children and with loving spouses to stand between them. Now that that day has finally come, she can no longer avoid a conversation she's long deflected.</p><p>A fix-it of sorts, inspired by drcalvin's "Gallant offers ill-delivered."</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Long Evening of Life

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Gallant offers ill-delivered](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5171666) by [drcalvin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/drcalvin/pseuds/drcalvin). 



> A particular paragraph in drcalvin's "Gallant offers ill-delivered" grabbed me and wouldn't let go - so this is my take on a future where Nurse's dreams for Julia and Tybalt more or less come true and they do finally have that conversation she's been avoiding.
> 
> While it's very much in response to her story, if Nurse/Tybalt isn't your thing, I think this does stand alone reasonably well and it doesn't reference that encounter. The "implied/referenced child abuse" tag refers to Tybalt's childhood, and it's not explicitly discussed.
> 
> Many thanks to Miss M. for the beta, and of course to drcalvin for writing such a great and layered story!

_No, she does not fear Tybalt, but she has no wish to speak of Julia with him. Not in the middle of the night, nor beneath the blazing sun. No, round Julia they will keep silent speak until Angelica has grown withered and gray, and there is a brood of children and two well-to-do spouses standing guard between the cousins. Then, and only then, is she willing to hear him out._  
-"[Gallant offers ill-delivered](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5171666)," by drcalvin

* * *

The children always come to see her first, tumbling along like a pack of puppies: Julia’s twin girls grown tall and golden, with their younger brother clutching at their skirts; Tybalt’s lad dimpled and smiling like neither of his parents. They sing her a song, out of tune, the youngest forgetting the words and the eldest shouting a bit—so Tybalt had also done, when he was young enough that Julia could still persuade him to sing. 

Angelica smiles at them and hides her winces—they mean well—and thanks God it is not she who is their music master. She is the nearest to a grandmother that they have; Romeo’s mother is not good with children, and Lady Capulet, rest her poor soul, has lain in the Capulet crypt these four years past, leaving only a faint memory for the older children. (Angelica will not speak ill of the dead, or think too long on how Tybalt's shoulders slowly grew less stiff, after. She only wishes the woman peace at last.) Although she has not been a nurse for many years, her pockets are still full of sweets, and her handkerchief can still wipe clean sticky hands. 

Their nurses, out of breath from running to catch up, curtsey to her as they round up their charges and herd them away. 

Today Romeo is in Mantua on business—she has a little present from him in her workbasket, waiting to be unwrapped after supper—but Julia and Rosa bring armfuls of roses in from the garden to place in baskets around her room and tell her of how the city has already been decorated with streamers and flowers to celebrate the birth of the Prince’s heir, long-awaited without hope. It is a fine thing, she supposes, to share a birthday with a prince, and perhaps the city will still be decked out when her leg no longer pains her and she can leave the hearthside again. It is healing well, the surgeon said; she is fortunate to be so strong at her age, and that it was a clean break. Still, she feels a shadow on her that she hadn’t felt before—once she would have cursed the cat that rushed under her feet in the dark hallway and caught herself, perhaps bruised her knees a little and scraped her hands, but she wouldn’t have tumbled down the stairs and broken her leg. It is the sort of foolish accident that happens to old women, women whose hair has gone even grayer than hers.

Still, her hands are steady in mending and embroidery, her eyes clear, and she hears well enough if people do not mumble. And her room is cozy, near to the kitchens but quiet enough, with a new featherbed and woven rugs from Turkey. Her charge, her dear little frog, her Julia is a grown woman with a loving husband and children of her own. She cannot complain, even if she hates to be sitting still when there is so much to do.

The roses fill the air with such a heavy scent that Rosa goes to open the shutters, muttering something about how dark and close it is. Julia’s embrace is no longer the hard clutch of a girl but the firm softness of a mother, comforting where once Angelica had comforted her. “You’ll be up again soon, Mistress Angelica,” she says, and Angelica tries not to miss a childish voice that once called her Nurse, as if that were all the name she had. “We’ll go to the lake when you’re well.”

Tybalt, at the door, stands aside for them to pass with grave courtesy and a small smile for his wife, a nod for his cousin, all perfectly correct. But his gaze lingers not on Rosa’s dark curls, but on Julia’s fair braids, woven with pale green ribbons to match her gown.

She isn’t afraid of what she’ll see when he turns, not anymore; there’s only a faint wistful sadness around the corners of his eyes and mouth, swiftly banished by his smile at her as he strides over to the hearth.

His marriage is happy enough—happier than Angelica thought possible. Rosa matches him in temper, although they have both mellowed with time, and she doesn’t fear him. If the boy came a little soon after the wedding, if he does not look anything like Tybalt—well, he is healthy and strong and perhaps it is Rosa’s grandfather he takes after, or great-grandfather. Whatever Julia thinks of her little cousin, she was never anything but kind to Rosa or the lad. For his part, fatherhood has settled Tybalt in a way she never thought to see. She’d once wished for him an entire brood of children, but there is only the one—and not likely to be more now.

Well, perhaps that is for the best, when sickness so often runs in families. Perhaps Tybalt also thinks it so, for he dotes on the boy with a care edged with well-concealed fear. He’s no reason to worry—his sins have never been his father’s—but perhaps it keeps him honest, keeps him gentle, he who has always struggled with tenderness.

He kneels by her chair with grace grown more assured and takes her hand, pressing his lips to it. “Mistress Angelica,” he says, “I would wish you a happy birthday, but—” he glances at her leg, propped up on a stool, and grimaces. “Here, I will fetch you another rug.”

“I pray you don’t, Master Tybalt,” she says, catching at his hands. “I have a broken leg, not a fever; I shall swelter with another rug.”

So instead Tybalt must content himself with fussing over the rug she already has, tucking it in with intent care. He frets as much as an old woman, and she hides her smile behind her hand. “How fare you, Master Tybalt?” she asks, and he looks up at her, startled. It’s strange, how often now he seems to look younger than he had ten years ago, even though fatherhood has softened his jawline and grayed his temples, cut new lines into his forehead—aye, but around his mouth and eyes as well, lines of laughter as well as worry. It is that which makes him look younger, she supposes.

“Well enough,” he says after a moment, and then gives a little laugh that is less bitter than the one that still echoes sometimes in her memory. “Can you believe it? Rosa tells me that time is a great healer. I suppose there are always scars, but they ache a deal less than they used to. I am content.”

Time, and perhaps affection, uncomplicated and not stunted by growing in the dark. For all her hot temper, Rosa has no love of shadows and no patience for pedestals. Perhaps in the light old torments have withered and died at last. “And I am glad for it,” she says, and squeezes his hands.

“Mistress,” he says, very serious, “may I ask you a question?”

There are only a few questions that he would ask permission to ask, none of them topics of light conversation; but she is feeling a great warmth towards him today—towards all of them, her chicks and their chicks, their strange sprawling family that has come so far from the darkness of the past, and not even left an old woman behind in the rubble—and so she nods, although her belly clenches a bit.

For an agonizing moment it seems he will not speak at all, that words too long unsaid have rusted away to nothing. At last the first words come, slowly, and then he can't say them fast enough, all the words he’s pent up inside for decades. If he hadn’t been ill, if his father had not been his father, if they hadn’t been stepped in hatred and resentment from the moment of birth, if they hadn’t been cousins, if, if, if—

“Do you think I could ever have been—worthy of her?”

It's not quite the question Angelica has avoided for so many years.

His voice is choked, gravel and broken glass. Even now, he can’t bring himself to say her name, but there’s only ever been one woman who could tie Tybalt up in that kind of knot, Romeo’s sweet bride, the little frog who grew up into a wise woman with children of her own.

Her vision blurs, hot tears threatening to spill from her eyes. “Tybalt,” she says, and maybe now she’s clutching his hands too hard, forgetting her place. “Love isn’t about worthiness.”

“Forgive me,” he says, and his arms aren’t steady or soft like Julia’s, even when he tries to offer comfort. That much hasn't changed. There’s still the desperate little boy in his touch, even now. “I shouldn’t have—it’s your birthday, and I’ve made you cry. I always—dear Angelica, I’m sorry—”

"I can't tell you what might have been." She touches his cheek, smooths his brow, tucks an errant lock of hair behind his ear. It's growing long again, but he hasn't spoken of cutting it, not since Rosa had teased him at supper that soon enough he'd look like a knight out of a fairytale again. Under her fingers it's soft, clean and well-combed. "But love isn't something you _earn._ "

Perhaps she oversteps her place—but it’s not the first time she and Tybalt have been too honest with each other, and her at least he might hear, now. “Did your son have to earn your love? Will he lose it if he breaks your favorite cup or pulls the dog’s tail one too many times?”

He looks up at her, stricken. “No! Of course not. That’s—” He grimaces, his hands coming up as if to ward off the idea.

“Different?” she asks, as gently as she can. She sees his answer written in the bitter twist of his lips, the old defensive self-mockery rising up again. “Nay, it’s no different.” She wipes her eyes with her sleeve cuff and pats his hand again. “Come, Master Tybalt, don’t fret. I’m just a foolish old woman who weeps too easily. Why don’t you fetch the draughts board from the shelf over there, if you haven’t anywhere to go for a bit.”

He’s composed himself again by the time he turned and sets up the board, and by the third or fourth move she’s managed to coax a smile from him, although his thoughts remain far away. 

They're still playing draughts when Rosa and Julia return, carrying trays piled with bread and cheese and roasted meat—oh, and Angelica's favorite apple compote, fragrant with orange peel and cinnamon.

"You shouldn't have to eat alone on your birthday," Julia says, pulling up a stool beside her. "Would you like duck first or mutton?"

On the other side of the table, Tybalt and Rosa are engaged in a complex negotiation, one that ends in Tybalt's bark of a laugh and Rosa sitting on his knee, trying and failing to look as if she has not just been soundly kissed. "Don't bargain with my wife," Tybalt tells Angelica and Julia solemnly. "You will lose."

"And well do I know it," says Julia and whatever look she gives Rosa, soon enough they both dissolve into laughter.

They're all right, her chicks, Angelica thinks, they’ll be all right, against all the odds. Even Tybalt. 

She eats her compote first, because she is old, and it is her birthday, and none of them will dare say a word against it.

**Author's Note:**

> An only tangentially relevant coda:
>
>> "Cousin Romeo?"
>> 
>> It's Tybalt's boy, Tonio—always Romeo reminds himself, Tybalt's boy, even if sometimes it is startlingly like looking into a mirror of his youth. Tybalt is the one who endured his mother's curses during the birth (loud enough to be heard in the garden, he heard the servants say later), Tybalt is the one who dried his toddler's tears and made him his first wooden sword, Tybalt is the one who bought him a lute when he spent half a year tagging after the Prince's minstrel and gruffly told him he'd better spare the household his caterwauling and learn to play an instrument, at least until he could carry a tune. Tybalt is his father in all the ways that count. Rosa makes polite conversation with him about the weather when she visits with Julia, and the children play together, heedless of the secrets their parents will never voice.
>> 
>> "What is it?" he asks. "Let me see."
>> 
>> Tonio holds up a wooden box, Moorish work by the look of the intricate scrolling carvings, a delicate thing a bookish boy might use to hold his treasures. The hinge is broken, the lid half off, and he eyes it with some trepidation, holding it as carefully as he would a blown eggshell. "Have you asked your father to fix it?"
>> 
>> "He's busy," Tonio says, shoving his mop of curly hair back from his eyes with a pleading look. Romeo shudders a bit inwardly, remembering exactly how much that kind of look could get away with. "He said you might help."
>> 
>> "Oh, _did_ he?" Well, that was either surprising charity on Tybalt's part—Romeo has never had the patience for such delicate work, or any aptitude for it—or some ironic humor. Although—his humor can at times be strange and satirical, but it is not his way to use Tonio in it.
>> 
>> What Tybalt truly thinks of him, he no longer knows; he long ago resigned himself that they would not be friends. Courteous, for the sake of their wives and children; even friendly, on some occasions. But not friends. Sometimes, though, he wonders if it is less that Tybalt doesn't _wish_ it than that he doesn't know _how._
>> 
>> But that is a thought for a few Sunday afternoons, and perhaps a talk with Julia. He hands the box back to Tonio.
>> 
>> "Well, _I_ think we ought to ask your cousin Benvolio, unless you would prefer a box with no lid at all. Do you know, I think I saw him in the garden earlier...."


End file.
